The Anachronism catches a wave

On Monday one of my favourite daily online reads, the sci-fi culture blog io9, published a post showcasing the recently-released trailer for my short film The Anachronism. Thousands of Steampunks and assorted onlookers around the globe checked us out on YouTube.  It’s been fascinating to chart the ripple we’ve sent out into the data cloud.

I love tracking the way one person’s speculation about the details of the plot gets picked up in comment threads and quickly mutates into faux-spoilers. All I’ll say for now is that there is some misinformation out there about the direction the story takes! What people are correct in speculating about is that The Anachronism short film is just the first seed of a larger Steampunk storyworld that my collaborator Dusty Hagerüd and I will be revealing over the course of the coming year, starting with the online release of the film on April 16th.

The projects will be released independently under a Creative Commons license, and we’ll be creating a distribution environment that encourages our audience to share and interact with our storytelling in several ways.

Review: The Secret of Kells

Few of the 2010 Oscar nominations emerged from deeper in left field than the nod for Best Animated Feature to The Secret of Kells, an independent Irish/French coproduction that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in January 2009. When I stumbled across a copy at a friend’s place in December I found myself enchanted, but surprised that I had never heard of the film. I only realized that it was a recent release when the title turned up on the nominations list last week. Here’s to hoping that director Tomm Moore and company now have the leverage to achieve a higher level of media exposure in North America. The film deserves the recent boost in attention.

This highly stylized animated story centres on Brendan, an apprentice text illuminator living in 8th Century Ireland. It is a time of transition from Paganism to Christianity, when the fear of Viking raids dominates daily existence. The film presents a speculative history behind the creation of the real-life Book of Kells, a masterpiece of illuminated Christian text.

Moore takes his aesthetic cues from his source material, rendering his world in extreme 2D relief. This approach is stunningly beautiful. The look of the animation feels fresh and contemporary, while also evoking the ancient visual textures and atmosphere of its subject matter. Restricting the depth in the compositions frees the animators from any concern for realism, allowing them to interpret environments and action as living celtic scrollwork.  We see not the forest, but the cultural conceptions of the forest in that era. Moore pushes this engagement with stylized representation to significant thematic impact, achieving sequences of kinetic conflict that depict the philosophical tensions of the mediaeval age in purely visual terms, as in the clip below:

The script seems oddly structured in places. I’m torn between celebrating the unconventional pacing or chalking it up to uneven writing. Perhaps the narrative flow does stumble a little towards the end, much like in the other near-great animated film that Kells likely wrestled its Oscar nomination away from: Ponyo.

Ten years in film and video

I’ve added a new page to the blog, featuring a complete filmography of every project I’ve signed my name to as writer/director. It’s been a little over ten years since I sat down with two consumer-grade VCRs to start cutting my first attempts at video making on VHS tape. It strikes me that my progress is a mirror of the film industry’s transition from analog to digital over the last decade. I can see a career path where I never shoot a feature on 35mm. I belong to a transitional generation of filmmakers. Are we the crest of a New Wave, or are we a “lost generation” falling through the cracks?

The Anachronism surfaces…

My latest short film The Anachronism is currently being groomed for independent release two months hence! In anticipation of the April 16th “online surfacing” of the entire 15 minute film, we’ve launched a new website and a new trailer for the project:

I’ll be posting news soon about exciting plans for the launch party. In the meantime I invite you to rate the trailer on YouTube and join the Facebook Fanpage!

Not for pleasure alone

To kick things off with this new cinema-blog I’ll pay homage to the source of its title: Ingmar Bergman’s final masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (1982), a film released the year I was born.

Consider the opening sequence: the camera travels down the facade of an antique miniature theatre. The proscenium arch is emblazoned with a motto: “Not for pleasure alone.” Below, the wooden curtain slides away to reveal 2d cutout actors illuminated by candle footlights. Behind them looms the face of Alexander, already bored by  the toy dramas he orchestrates. He wanders out into his family home. Unable to find company, he crawls under the dining table and begins to fall asleep. For a moment, as his eyelids droop, a ray of sunshine illuminates a statue along the far wall. The statue reaches out and gestures to him, but the fleeting illusion breaks with the arrival of a household servant.

This suggestion of magical potential returns at the climax of the film, when Alexander is taught to harness his imagination to directly intercede in the narrative of his own life. If we choose to see Alexander as an avatar of Bergman himself, then few artists have articulated such a succinct, elegant illustration of the through-line between childhood fantasy and the real-world impact of the mature storyteller’s craft. Those opening words on the proscenium arch reverberate throughout the film, as they do indeed throughout the breadth of Bergman’s entire body of work, insisting  on a self-conscious effort to create narratives of real consequence.

Bergman announced his retirement from feature filmmaking upon the release of Fanny and Alexander, though he continued to write and direct for theatre and television until well into his last decade. It is a delightful, sentiment-filled work, offering up more pure “pleasure” that any of his previous films. Indeed, the austere reputation of his darker pieces have tempted many to dismiss Bergman for having taken his anti-pleasure motto too far. But with Fanny & Alexander the king of angst lets a final note of optimism resound, reassuring us that it was all worthwhile. Not for pleasure alone, but not without it either.